James joyce, p.6
James Joyce, page 6
The general expectation was that Parnell would prevail in Ireland. In carefully marshalling his strengths, Parnell knew the outcome was uncertain and required him to maximise every advantage. The scale of adversity was to prove greater than he could have anticipated, and he found himself in a desperate losing struggle. He was confronted by a majority of Home Rule politicians who asserted that, in seeking to maintain his leadership, he was subverting the alliance with the Liberal party, sustained by the influence of the Catholic Church, which was more or less uninhibitedly deployed against him. He found himself the subject of a ferocious populistic Catholic onslaught, conceived by his principal adversary, Healy, on his relations with Katharine O’Shea. His myth of selfless Protestant patriotism was thrown into reverse: now he was assailed as a Protestant landlord of dictatorial disposition who, with the selfishness of his caste, was prepared to jeopardise the attainment of Home Rule for Ireland in the furtherance of a sexual passion.
The first of the three by-elections in Ireland in what remained of Parnell’s life took place in North Kilkenny in December. It was a ferocious affair. Joyce, perhaps in part because of his own problems with his eyesight, was fixated on the episode in Castlecomer in which Parnell was struck in the eye by a projectile which the Parnellites said was of prepared lime (not quicklime, as Joyce was to assert).10 This led to Parnell somewhat melodramatically wearing a large bandage over the side of his head for the duration of the election. The defeat of Parnell’s candidate by a near two-to-one margin shattered the myth of his invincibility in Ireland. The drift of his more opportunistic supporters to the anti-Parnellite side on one pretext or another set in.
Parnell pressed on, fiercely insisting on the principle of Irish independence and denouncing anti-Parnellite obeisance to the Liberal party and the Catholic Church. The Parnellite candidate lost by a closer margin in North Sligo in April. When the divorce decree was made absolute, Parnell refused to defer his marriage to Katharine O’Shea until after the third by-election in Carlow. They were married at the registry office in Steyning, near Brighton, on 25 June 1891. The election descended into a carnival of coarse ribaldry, and the Parnellite candidate Andrew Kettle, father of Joyce’s University College contemporary Thomas M. Kettle, sustained a heavy defeat.
Parnell fought implacably on, still showing considerable political adroitness and fiercely awaiting a reversal of fortune. He crossed every weekend from Brighton, where he lived with Katharine, to Ireland to address meetings in Ireland. His health, always frail, did not withstand the savagely punishing rhythm of the Split. After a year of terrible and unremitting reversals, he died in Brighton at the age of forty-five on 6 October 1891. The abruptness of the end was strangely of a piece with the pace of his astonishingly crisis-charged career, without parallel in contemporary Irish or British politics. Suddenly it was all over.
The memory of Parnell outlasted his immense funeral in Dublin. He was bitterly mourned and continued to be extravagantly commemorated in Dublin by his supporters on the anniversaries of his death. The Parnellite party had lost its leader and were reduced to a rump at the general election of 1892; the anti-Parnellites could not replicate his charismatic command of Irish nationalism. The recriminations of the ‘long Split’ between the divided factions of parliamentary nationalism lasted from 1890 through the defeat of Gladstone’s Second Home Rule Bill in the House of Lords in 1893 until the reunification of the Irish Party in 1900. While his name was ceaselessly invoked by both sides, and the reunited Irish Party sought to draw on his allure, the political memory of what had been Parnell’s vital force seeped away inexorably across the 1890s. Other controversies and divisions within Ireland did something to displace the recall of the events of 1890–91. Unquiet residues of the Split endured nonetheless. In time those residues engendered a literary myth fashioned quasi-collaboratively by James Joyce and W. B. Yeats.
Joyce’s Identification with Parnell
It is not possible to fathom the depth of Joyce’s allegiance to Parnell without an appreciation of the Split’s cruel rhythm and of Parnell’s perseverance and refusal—one might say absolute temperamental incapacity—to be unnerved by the scale of the reversals he sustained. Joyce dwelt all his life on Parnell’s undaunted defiance of crushing adversity in the Split. He fiercely upheld the principles that Parnell stood for in the Split, and scorned Parnell’s opponents, but it is important to appreciate that this reflected more than abstract conviction. It was sustained by the warmth and affection of his identification with Parnell.11 Joyce certainly considered Parnell a heroic figure and intensely admired him as a leader, but his relationship to the dead leader had nothing of the nineteenth-century deference for the statesman or the ‘great man’. It was without hierarchical deference and had a certain democratic equality to it. In his 1912 article for Il Piccolo della Sera in Trieste, Joyce took pains, and derived some joy, from distinguishing Parnell from the two emblematic ‘great men’ of the late Victorian era, Benjamin Disraeli and Gladstone: ‘But time is more merciful towards the “uncrowned king” than towards the wag and the orator. The light of [Parnell’s] mild, proud, silent and disconsolate sovereignty makes Disraeli look like an upstart diplomat dining whenever he can in rich people’s houses, and Gladstone like a portly butler who has gone to night school. How little Disraeli’s wit and Gladstone’s culture weigh in the balance today! What trifles are Disraeli’s studied witticisms, greasy hair and doltish novels, or Gladstone’s high-sounding sentences, Homeric studies and speeches on Artemis or marmalade!’12
The overlap in the lives of Parnell and of Joyce was short and pertained to a period in which Joyce was a child. For Joyce, who was preternaturally, almost superstitiously, attentive to coincidences, his childhood induction into the politics of the Split marked a first intersection of his life with Parnell’s seemingly doomed but unyielding campaign to re-establish his ascendancy in the Split, and his death. Their lives remained thereafter occultly connected in Joyce’s perception, fortifying a certain collusiveness in his identification with Parnell.
The impact of the Parnell Split on Joyce as a boy is principally perceived through the explosive Christmas dinner scene in the Dedalus household three months after Parnell’s death, as depicted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is a superbly epitomised rendering of the Split in a domestic setting. The scene is so graphic, so formative of how Joyce’s relation to Parnell is perceived, and so central to how the Split is faintly understood in contemporary Ireland that it is disappointing—and disorientating—to have to accept that it is unlikely ever to have taken place. It stands as a hauntingly exact invocation of the temper of nationalist Ireland in the terrible Christmas that followed Parnell’s death, and a stylised rendering of Joyce’s sudden immersion in Irish politics and acquisition of a fealty to Parnell as a boy. It contains biographical prompts and clues through which Joyce’s induction into the Irish political can be elucidated.
There is a prevalent mischaracterisation of the Parnellism of Joyce’s father—entrenched by John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello in their John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of Joyce’s Father (1998)—as a committed Parnellite sympathiser and activist from 1880. In fact, John Stanislaus Joyce only became an ardent supporter of Parnell from the divorce crisis on. This is crucial. His father’s impulsive support of the embattled Parnell of 1890–91 came, across the passage of years, to represent for Joyce an uncharacteristically heroic gesture, a large mitigation of his father’s multiple foibles. The theme of the fall and redemption in Finnegans Wake was to be deeply informed by this. A significant integrating motif of the Wake has been lost through a misunderstanding of the politics of Joyce’s father.
The young Joyce did not take on faith his father’s support of Parnell in the Split. He sought to inform himself, as far as a young boy could, of the controversy in which Parnell died in order to put himself in a position to make what he conceived as an independent election to support Parnell’s cause. It marks a forced and precocious transition from boyhood to independent critical thinking under conditions that were unimaginable in a boyhood in England, or in any established European state. Parnell is an emblematic figure in Joyce’s rendering of what it was to grow up in a nation that statehood had eluded.
This belies the simplistic idea that Joyce adoptively mimicked his father’s Parnellism, and that this shallow and derivative Parnellism mellowed into a sentimental memory of a boyhood allegiance, albeit one edged with the contemporary bitterness of the Split of 1890–91. The idea that Joyce’s conception of Parnell was fixed and static, an icon borne aloft from a late nineteenth-century Irish nationalist childhood, does not withstand scrutiny.
Joyce was loyal to Parnell and was a nationalist. If he can be referred to as a Parnellite nationalist, that is not to assert that his nationalism was simply an emanation of his Parnellism. While Parnell was central to Joyce’s nationalism, and the Split crystallised his nationalism, it does not follow that Joyce would not have been nationalist but for Parnell. He was born into and raised within a nationalist tradition (or a tradition that was becoming nationalist). There is a subordinate Fenian strain in Joyce’s nationalism that descends in the male line that does not derive from Parnell. He came to have a deep sense of the rhythm of Irish nationalism, as well as a fecund mastery of demotic nationalist sentiment and rhetorical imagery, and he was adept at introducing personal flourishes mainly through ballad and song. That alone says much.
Parnell became a role model for Joyce as a child in a way that presaged how the figure of Parnell was to be bound up with the development of his art. There is little direct evidence, but it seems clear from his writings that Joyce in late boyhood dwelt intensely on Parnell and on what had transpired in the Split to bring about his fall. His bitter critique of contemporary Ireland derived in a significant and discernible degree from the Split. By the time he reached University College, Dublin, his Parnellism was reticent, even veiled. He had come to believe that Parnell had become occluded in Irish politics, damned with faint praise of his early career by those who had opposed him in the Split—an occlusion which the extravagant and repetitive laudations of his admirers in their unsustainable cult of a dead leader strangely served to complement. The cult of Parnell was fading by the time Joyce entered University College. His friend C. P. Curran, the most perceptive memorialist of Joyce as a college student, was able retrospectively to label him ‘a completely unpolitical Parnellite’.13
A Parnellian ethic of silence and hauteur constrained Joyce from vaunting a futile Parnellism. In University College he was regarded as someone whose preoccupations were artistic and certainly not political, even if that did not quite account for the fierceness of his dissentient apartness. He avowed himself a disciple of Henrik Ibsen rather than of Parnell. The shadow of Parnell nevertheless fell between Joyce and his most politically prominent contemporaries in University College, Thomas Michael Kettle and Francis Skeffington, both partisans of the Irish Parliamentary Party. In University College, Joyce began to map out his relationship to contemporary Irish nationalism, just about managing to keep in check his dread of the quasi-ideological tendencies of the Irish language revival. Joyce in time found himself driven back upon a rediscovered Parnellism. His understanding of Irish politics transpired to be deeper as well as less compromised than that of Kettle and Skeffington. His friendship with George Clancy, who was a partisan of the Revival, is perhaps the most moving of his college relations, rendered in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait, and does much to subvert received ideas of Joyce’s unyielding resistance to the radical nationalism of his generation.
The Split and Joyce’s ‘Two Masters’ Thesis
Exposed to the Split as a boy, Joyce as an adolescent and young man lived through its acrid backwash: the years of disillusionment in the dismal aftermath of the overthrow and death of Parnell. His critique of the Split was not merely historical and confined to the events of 1890–91; it was an indictment of the course of post-Parnellite nationalism, the chronicle of a calamity foretold by Parnell. For Joyce, as an exasperated proponent of Ireland’s modernisation as a European polity, the political regression of Ireland after Parnell demanded a response. His ‘two masters’ thesis—that the Irish had chosen to submit to the conjoint domination of Britain and of the Catholic Church—which he articulated in his 1912 poem ‘Gas from a Burner’ (‘Ireland, my first and only love / Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!’) and in the ‘Telemachus’ episode of Ulysses, derives directly from the Split. The thesis propounds that nationalist Ireland had degraded itself in submitting to the co-dominion of the Catholic Church and of the British state in its Liberal manifestation. Ireland would not be worthy of independence, nor achieve it, until the country had overcome the abjection of the Split. Ireland had severely compromised, if not quite forfeited, its own claim to independence. The culpability of the Church had been a major theme of the Split during Parnell’s lifetime, and drew on the long-standing Fenian objection to the Church’s encroachment in nationalist politics, but where Joyce stood alone was in his insistence on the inter-equation of the Irish Church and the British state in his analysis of Irish vassalage, and his maintaining that position long after the passion of the Split had abated.
In his treatment of the Split, Joyce was unusual in the fastidiousness with which he observed the interaction of the Irish and British political spheres. Most significantly for Joyce, the Catholic Church in Ireland was in incongruous alliance with Gladstone’s Liberal party, whose opposition to Parnell owed much to the ‘nonconformist conscience’, the emergence of which in Britain was crystallised by the O’Shea-Parnell divorce crisis. It was a strange moment of opportunistic ecumenism: the Irish Church was untroubled by the alliance, just as the nonconformists were happy to suspend their suspicions of Catholicism. The cross-contamination of politics and religious moralism was innately offensive to Joyce. Resistance to Liberal and clerical ‘dictation’ was a conventional Parnellite stance in the Split. But there is an important twist in Joyce’s response. He was profoundly disturbed by what he saw as the transgressive fusion of Catholic and evangelical values in opposition to Parnell. That affront was experienced in equal measure by Joyce as an Irish nationalist and philosophically as a former Catholic. Not merely had the majority of the Irish Party succumbed in the Split to ‘Liberal dictation’, but the Irish Church had submitted to a process of moralistic evangelisation. He saw the response of the Catholic Church in Ireland to the Split as its unthinking quasi-Protestantisation. For Joyce the Split was a fathomless pit of religious as well as political confusion and incoherence. His abhorrence was as much philosophical, and even quasi-theological, as it was political.
For Joyce the alliance of Irish Catholicism and British nonconformity lay at the heart of the political and intellectual morass of the Split. The widespread deployment of a pretended moralism and religiosity to political ends, suffused with an edge of pseudo-ethnicity and confessional prejudice, affronted Joyce and gave the Split a paradigmatic status and force in his thinking and writing. The Catholic-nonconformist coalition against Parnell is an early instance of the coincidence of opposites. Thus it was that Joyce’s observation and experience of the political across his lifetime persistently drove him back to the Split.
Joyce could never quite bring himself to forgive his countrymen the outcome of the Split. In insistently reverting to Parnell and to the issues of the Split, Joyce embarked on a calculated act of defiance of the Irish nationalist dispensation after Parnell’s death. He stood more or less alone in continuing to hold as an intellectual tenet that the issues of the Split remained to be confronted. Most Parnellites had in varying degrees come to acquiesce in political defeat, embracing in consolation the public cult of Parnell as the lost leader or, among the Parnellite elite, mourning in semi-privacy the extraordinary politician and disarming person they had known. Joyce’s recusant Parnellism, and his critique of Irish nationalist obsequiousness to the Catholic Church and to Gladstonian Liberalism, was thoroughly considered and philosophically cogent. It was a position that Joyce adopted as an intellectual ethic, rather than one which he overtly proselytised.
To the vast bulk of his countrymen, Parnellite and anti-Parnellite, Joyce’s belief in continuing to confront the issues of the Split would have seemed hopelessly devoid of any sense of political reality. He was certainly aware that the position he espoused was conventionally impolitic. His refusal to acquiesce in forgetting was not simply bred of personal conviction but owed something to strategic considerations. He realised that an uncompromising argument from a Parnellite-of-the-Split perspective remained deeply troubling to Irish nationalists and still had the capacity to disturb the post-Parnellite nationalist consensus; he was adamant in the belief that the consensus had to be challenged.
Joyce was scrupulously if sceptically receptive to contemporary politics. While he more or less ruled out the Irish literary movement, on grounds that were as much political as literary, he did set out to see if there were contemporaries or contemporary movements with which he could align himself, from Skeffington and Kettle, to Irish socialism, to the freethinking editors of Dana. It is true that he did not really expect to find allies but, with characteristic empirical thoroughness, he undertook the search. We tend to think of the intellectual trajectory that carried Joyce into exile as defined by his semi-alienation from contemporary nationalist politics (including the politics of the Literary Revival) and objection to the social hegemony of the Irish Church (both in itself and as a measure of the irremediable backwardness of Irish society). But what is defining and renders haunting the isolation of the Joyce who left Ireland is that he was unable to find among his own generation, and in radical or dissenting movements, any with whom he could make common cause. It could well be said that Joyce’s requirements were exorbitantly exigent, but from his perspective the prospects of a change of direction in Irish politics and intellectual life seemed, at the point of his leaving, forbiddingly bleak.
